The “Invisible Kingdom” author Meghan O’Rourke on the silent epidemic of chronic illness
Since the late 1990s, Meghan O’Rourke battled symptoms no one, including O’Rourke herself, could explain: dizziness, night sweats, fatigue, electric shock sensations, stabbing pain, hives. When on a trip to Vietnam in 2012 a rash—seven or eight raised bumps arranged in a circle—appeared on her inner arm, she thought, It looks like Braille. But what was it trying to tell her?
“There comes a time in every woman’s life when she sees herself as medicine has seen her: a mystery. An enigma. A black box that, for some reason, no one has managed to get inside.”
—Rachel E. Gross
Ten years ago, I went to see my ob-gyn, complaining of pain with sex. A pelvic examination revealed nothing. “Everything looks okay down there,” she said from her three-legged stool, adding that she would order a pelvic ultrasound. She paused a moment, then uttered words that would haunt me.
“Pelvic pain is the black box of gynecology.”
When I was four years old, I came up with a plan: I was going to make my mother well. “Mom, I’m making you an energy machine,” I announced from the kitchen table. My mother was at the counter preparing lunch, her dark hair pulled back in a long, loose ponytail, her legs pale underneath cut-off shorts. The machine was fueled with orange juice: we used to keep those cylindrical containers of Minute Maid concentrate in the freezer. Someone once told me that orange juice gives you energy. When the machine was ready, my mother sat down at the table and drank the juice. “I know this will make me feel better,” she said, her amber eyes twinkling. A part of me believed her. A part of me knew she was playing along. Sure enough, come afternoon, my mother curled up, like always, on the brown plaid couch. While she napped, I played house with three dolls named Amy: Old Amy, New Amy, Big Amy.
All through my childhood, my mother’s lupus was present in one way or another. It gave structure to our quiet days: as my father left for his machinist job at a factory, my mother cooked breakfast and cleaned the kitchen. If she was well enough, she quilted or sewed while I played. With afternoons came her nap; she’d wake up around the time my father returned. The sound of the Plymouth station wagon scraping into the carport was our cue. My mother was too tired to cook in the evenings, so when Dad got home we’d grab our things, pile into the Plymouth, and drive to Denny’s. There weren’t many restaurants in Woodland, California, but there were several Denny’s franchises, so we rotated — Mondays at Denny’s on Main Street, Tuesdays at Denny’s on West Street, Wednesdays at Denny’s on East Street. As the years went by, we followed this routine — breakfast, lunch, nap, Denny’s — faithfully, although in time my mother moved more slowly on the way out the door, her naps became longer, and quilting projects languished half-finished in the sewing room.
Sunday evenings in high school, I attended youth services at a local evangelical church. One Sunday, I tagged along on a post-worship excursion to the McDonald’s on Main Street. We ate fries and drank shakes. There was a boy there, Ron, a black-haired kid with a wide grin whom I liked but who I knew was out of my league. Whenever there was a lag in the conversation, Ron liked to bust out raps about Jesus’s coolness. That summer night, after the shakes and fries, my girlfriends and I lingered in the parking lot, giggling approvingly at Ron’s raps. I think it occurred to me to call home, but I didn’t have change—and I didn’t want the night to end, as I knew it would when I heard my mother’s voice. Around 9 p.m., I was finally dropped off at our mobile home park. My mother was in quite a state. It seems she had called the police, telling them that her daughter should have been home hours ago. I don’t know exactly what she asked the police to do, or if she managed to articulate a request at all. Maybe she just assumed that, hearing I was missing, they would begin combing the streets, on the lookout for a girl, seventeen years old, 5’8, with dark hair, a little overweight from all the shakes and fries.
Published Article: MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture
A soiled hand, a ringed finger; the hint of a shoulder. An exposed breast. A lock of hair emerging from the dirt. Eyes closed in rest, or possibly open, bearing knowledge of the one who did this, knowledge that, for now, eludes we who look. Few figures titillate like the fictional corpse, whose body parts often come to us in bits and pieces. From Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) to the contemporary Dead Girl Show (Bolin 2018), crime narratives tend to display what G.S. Close calls a ‘necropornographic’ (2018) impulse. [1] In crime television today, the series’ inaugural dead body, so often female, acts as both ‘attention grabber and holder,’ both ‘hook and bond’. (Klinger 2018: 521) Her body is the enigma, the riddle, which the detective will go on to solve. That which we first see—breast, shoulder, leg—may never again appear on screen, but the memory of her flesh keeps us engaged, keeps us watching. Who could have done this?
There’s a scene early on in the Apple TV thriller Losing Alice where Alice, a 48-year-old mother of three, sits on a wharf drinking a beer with a young woman named Sophie. A filmmaker, Alice has put her career on pause to focus on her family. But when Sophie, a young screenwriter who idolizes Alice, asks Alice to direct her freshman project, a dark tale involving BDSM and a mysterious death, Alice agrees. She is captivated not just with the screenplay but with Sophie herself, who is beautiful and, most importantly, uninhibited.
“There’s always a ton of guilt,” Alice confides to Sophie, describing the challenges of being a wife, mother and filmmaker.
She asks Sophie if she experiences guilt: “No,” she replies without hesitation.
With Sophie’s encouragement, Alice begins to loosen up: The two attend a sensual, sweaty dance class together, get drunk on a boat, and go swimming in night waters. Sophie represents Alice’s libidinal other, an externalized id; to say yes to Sophie is to say yes to everything she’s repressed as a wife and mother.
